Epistles of Le Révérend Docteur

GIF’s origins are modest. The Graphics Interchange Format was introduced by Compuserve in 1987 with a specification published by the late Larry Wood. By just two years later, GIF had grown popular enough that the specification was updated, with a fairly rudimentary ability to display multiple images bolted onto the specification. (The spec warned, “The Graphics Interchange Format is not intended as a platform for animation, even though it can be done in a limited way.”)As the browser wars heated up, Netscape decided to embrace the primitive-but-fun animation capability of the image format, and made it part of their browser.

While most museums of GIFs pay homage to their shlocky, tacky ubiquity in the pre-social era of the web, the format today has evolved into a transcendent, expressive medium.

The original sample source file was produced and prepared by the development team of the ground-breaking 3D character animation software product Character Studio (used with 3D Studio Max, both products from Kinetix/Autodesk)